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WhatSize now mostly shareware

We’ve been having a bit of bad luck lately with developers deciding to charge for what was previously freeware. The latest to come to our attention is WhatSize, a utility that measures the size of your folders and the subfolders within them. You can then sort them, with the biggest first. This comes in handy when trying to figure out which data is taking up the most space on your hard drive. Alas, it now costs $12.99. You have the option of using it free to measure 20 MB of data, but it hardly seems worth it.

And so WhatSize is hereby deleted from the thriftmac collection.

Thanks, by the way, to a reader for the tip. If you’ve got one, we do appreciate them.

Posted Thursday, December 18, 2008 in

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  1. OmniDiskSweeper is the exact same application, but it’s free! Sure, it’s technically “shareware”, but the only thing paid status allows you to do is auto-delete files. Instead, just right-click a file, choose “reveal in finder”, and then delete the file there. In a sense, it’s free, and works great!

    mike b.

  2. I take it back about right-clicking. Rather, just double click on any item, and it will be revealed in finder. It’s a piece of cake!

    mike b.

  3. Simple rule: If you’re not serious enough about the product to quit your day job and start a company, then you don’t get my money. I don’t want to discover that the product is orphaned because the author decided to concentrate his efforts on his hang gliding school. I do not want to pay for a product and not be able to get tech support for two weeks because the author crashed his car.

    Authors, you need to decide if you want to write freeware as a hobby or commercial software as a business.

    And let’s stop perverting the term: “Shareware” refers to fully functional software which is freely shared for which the author requests a donation. It’s not demoware, crippleware, a time-limited product, etc. The shareware concept was invented in 1982 by Jim Knopf, who distributed the program PC-File with a donation request. There were no activation codes, time limits, or any of the other crap that people are now falsely attributing to shareware.

    Fred_M.

  4. I expressed similar sentiments in an article called To pay or not to pay. I’m thinking the new name for what used to be called shareware should be honourware. Honourable people would donate if they used the program a lot and felt it was worthy.

    Mark





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